http://www.gameslol.com Marek Bronstring's game blog Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:17:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en "Massively singleplayer" is an apparent oxymoron that's been floating around for a while. Will Wright has on occasion half-jokingly called Spore a massively singleplayer game because of how it spreads content amongst users. Other people have used the term to mock MMOs that can be played entirely without interacting with ... http://www.gameslol.com/2008/07/17/massively-singleplayer-a-real-genre/ This month I moved to the UK to work at NCsoft Europe, based in Brighton. I've joined their new internal development team, which is working on multiple unannounced games. I absolutely love the new job and the people who work at the company. Though to my surprise no one in the ... http://www.gameslol.com/2008/05/18/new-job/ Or so says Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. So I guess that's it for Guitar Hero as we know it, and that might not be a good thing. Is it possible to make a Guitar Hero style game featuring additional peripherals? Sure, why not. (Rock Band says hi.) But when the ... http://www.gameslol.com/2008/04/22/guitar-hero-is-not-just-about-guitars/ Wikis are commonly used in game design, as it makes the documentation easier to use and share, and easier to break down into smaller more manageable chunks. But one of the things that wiki software sadly doesn't do well are graphs and tables.Perhaps some wiki software exists that handles tables ... http://www.gameslol.com/2008/04/17/embedding-graphs-and-tables-into-wikis/ It's totally disappointing though. There isn't even a cut scene. :( http://www.gameslol.com/2008/03/06/at-last-i-have-completed-linkedin/ Remember when you were a kid and your parents went to IKEA and they put you in the ball pool and then you were like "oh man, there's a million colored balls! And I can swim in them! Wheeeeeeee!". Personally I don't remember that at all, because I have never ... http://www.gameslol.com/2008/03/02/who-else-thinks-the-indie-scene-is-freaking-brilliant/ At the Game Designers Rant, Jane McGonigal held an inspiring rant about the need for game designers to approach real-life experiences with a game design mindset. The real world, she argued, is often boring and/or broken, and there's a lot that game designers can do to make people more engaged ... http://www.gameslol.com/2008/02/28/gdc-applying-game-design-to-real-life/ After being stuck in Texas for a while due to a delayed flight, as well as enduring more than the usual amount of jetlag, I'm finally back and ready to reflect on this year's Game Developers Conference. The mood at GDC 2008 was very positive, perhaps even elated. It feels as ... http://www.gameslol.com/2008/02/28/back-from-gdc/